Friday, May 11, 2012

DJE? (12); Interpolations of Convenience

One way that some mythicists have gotten around the problem that this, our earliest Christian source, refers to the historical Jesus in several places is by claiming that these references to Jesus were not originally in Paul's writings but were inserted by later Christian scribes who wanted to think that he referred to the historical Jesus. This approach to Paul can be thought of as historical research based on the principle of convenience. If historical evidence proves inconsistent to one's views, then simply claim that the evidence does not exist, and suddenly you're right.
Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? p.118.

I am sometimes accused of proposing interpolations of convenience when I suggest the possibility that maybe Paul did not write "I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother." Gal. 1:19. Maybe he only wrote "I saw none of the other apostles—only James." Maybe some later scribe inserted "the Lord's brother" because he thought readers might be confused about which James it was that Paul met. For that matter, maybe Paul only wrote "I saw none of the other apostles." Maybe the insertion of "only James, the Lord’s brother" was the result of some theological turf war where a member of some James faction was trying to make him equal to Peter by putting him at those first meetings with Paul.  Given the 150 year gap between the composition of Galatians and the earliest surviving manuscripts, there are no doubt many interpolations that didn't leave any evidence in the manuscript tradition and whose motivations we might not recognize.  What if this is one of them?

In a discussion over at Exploring our Matrix, one comment seemed to sum up the the anti-interpolation viewpoint pretty well:
I also have a real problem with people reading in interpolations wherever it's convenient for their theory (rather than on textual critcal evidence), as it makes their theories unfalsifiable. And if they are unfalsifiable, are they really acceptable theories?

In the absence of the original autograph, could you prove that any passage in any classical text isn't an interpolation? If you think there's a gap between Paul and our earliest extant copy of his letters, think about how big that gap is for other classical authors: it's well over 1,000 years for Herodotus, I think.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable position, i.e., absent evidence to the contrary, why not presume that the text we have is what the author originally wrote?  But like so many arguments in this field, it can be turned around:

Given that we can't prove that any passage isn't an interpolation, why would we treat any text as any more than an approximation of the original, i.e., our best guess?  Why would we claim any more certainty about a passage being original than is warranted by the gap between the original and the earliest manuscripts?  Why would we propose any theory that was not robust enough to withstand the possibility of interpolations?  If we can't prove that any passage is original even where our manuscripts agree, how can we adopt the presumption that it is, even if that presumption is rebuttable?  Isn't it more logical to adjust the conclusions we draw to the appropriate level of certainty?

The objection that is raised to answering yes to any of these questions is that it puts us on a slippery slope to a place where nothing is certain, but I think that this is overblown.   First off, if we can reliably date the earliest extant manuscripts to the end of the second century, then we can reliably say what the church at that time understood Paul to be saying.  Admittedly, that is not nearly as satisfying as thinking we know what Paul actually said, but it's still valuable.  Second off, we can develop positive reasons for thinking that a particular word or passage does go back farther.  In Paul's case, we can look for ideas that are expressed consistently in several places in several letters or ideas that fit well with his overall themes and concerns. One of the reasons historians always look for corroboration from multiple sources is because any single piece of evidence could be wrong or mistaken.  The more evidence you have bearing on a point, the stronger the conclusion.

Moreover, I do not think that this would necessarily open the door to just any old interpolation based argument.  The probability of any argument being correct is still going to decrease as the number of proposed interpolations increases.  If someone needs eight cherry picked interpolations to support a particular hypothesis, the odds are going to be pretty small that it is correct.   (One of the reasons that I remain agnostic about a historical Jesus is that it does seem to me that mythicists are frequently guilty of this.)  On the other hand, if positing a single interpolation would dramatically change our overall understanding of the text, then perhaps our understanding is too fragile.  Perhaps we shouldn't be proposing any interpretation of the text that would be vulnerable to an interpolation or two.

I often see it claimed that allowing for more interpolation based arguments would throw all ancient texts into question, but I don't see that either.  With texts like Plato and Aristotle, we don't worry as much about the autographs.  What  matters is what has come down to us as Plato and Aristotle and the influence those ideas have had on western thought throughout the ages. Very little depends on whether any specific word or passage came from the actual pen of the author to whom it is attributed. With texts like Herodotus, everything he writes is taken with the appropriate grain of salt anyway. Historians are always looking for corroboration from other ancient writings or from archaeology.  In the reading I have done,  historians of the ancient world don't seem to claim significant degrees of certainty on the kind of issues that depend on a single passage being the original writing of an ancient author.

It is only with the Bible that it becomes important to assert that we have the originals.  If you believe that God inspired certain men to deliver his inerrant truths to the world, then it is very important to be able to say whether the specific words were written by those specific men.  If someone unknown philosopher reworked a passage twenty-five years after Plato died in order to insert his own ideas, those ideas hold the exact same significance in the development of western thought as if Plato wrote them himself.  However, if someone reworked a passage in Galatians twenty-five years after Paul died, the ideas lose any authority they had by virtue of inspiration.  We cannot know that the changes were sanctioned by the Holy Spirit.

I suspect that the presumption in favor of originality is ultimately driven by concerns that are more theological than historical.  To many of the scholars working with the texts of the New Testament, it is very important to have some method that enables them to determine the original words of the New Testament because the original words have theological authority.  It is not enough for these scholars  to determine the words of the earliest extant manuscripts.  Therefore they have adopted a presumption in favor of originality based on the earliest manuscripts that is not logically justified.  It seems to me that this is scholarship of convenience.

For Ehrman the agnostic, the words don't carry any extra-historical authority by virtue of being written by Paul in 50 A.D rather than inserted by some unknown scribe in 125 A.D.  Nevertheless, even a secular historian can draw much stronger conclusions if he knows that he has the words of an early witness to events so it would be nice to think we can know that we do. However, as Ehrman clearly seemed to understand in his 2008 debate with Dan Wallace, wanting to know what Paul wrote and knowing what he wrote are two different things.
Can we trust that the copies of Galatians we have are the original copies. No. We don’t know. How could we possibly know? Our earliest copy of Galatians is p46 which dates from the year 200. Paul wrote this letter in the 50’s. The first copy that we have is 150 years later. Changes were made all along the line before this first copy was made. How can we possibly know that in fact it is exactly as Paul wrote it. Is it possible that somebody along the line inserted a verse? Yes. Is it possible that someone took out a verse? Yes. Is it possible that somebody changed a lot of the words? Yes. Is it possible that the later copies were made from one of the worst of the early copies? Yes. It’s possible. We don’t know.
. . . .
What I have said to my colleagues is that we are as close as we can hope to be to what we might imagine as the earliest text. What I have said in popular audiences is we don’t know if we can get back to the original text. And I stand by both statements. We don’t know what Paul originally wrote to the Galatians, and we no hope of getting any closer in the future than we are already now. We have no evidence that can get us any further back than we have already gotten and our earliest evidence is from the year 200, 150 years later. So can we know for certain? No. We can’t know for certain that the text is reliable. You might want to think it is. You might want to hope it is. You might want to say there are intelligent people who say it is so probably it is. But think about it. There are people copying these texts year after year, decade after decade.

7 comments:

  1. Bart sees no reason why he should not argue both sides of any case.

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  2. Bart explains all

    I think you will find that Bart gives a perfectly good explanation of why we should expect interpolations in Galatians, and also a perfectly good explanation of why it is wrong to think that there may be interpolations in 1 Thessalonians.

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  3. Hi Vinny,

    Interesting to read your thoughts about my comments on Exploring our Matrix. My own position is that the positions on interpolations you outine are not equivalent.

    Myself, I would say that a statement like "Paul thought that Jesus had a brother called James" is building a position based upon the best available evidence. I would, of course, acknowledge that we might find early or reliable copies of Pauls' letters that lack this passage and that this could well lead me to think that my position is wrong. And of course, in any decent Bible you will find references to passages that mark them out of interpolations or corruptions - the ending of Mark being the most obvious example.

    It seemed that over on Exploring our Matrix you were arguing that the reference to "James the brother of Jesus" might be an interpolation into the original text of Galatians. Now why it's true that it might be an interpolation, I am not aware of any evidence that it is. Moreover, I don't see how such a position could ever be falsified (how could anyone ever prove that you are wrong?)

    Personally, given a choice between a falsiable position based on the best available evidence and a non-falsiable position based on no evidence, I would always, always, go for the first option.

    You're right of course, that we can't be 100% about what was written in pre-modern times, but I think that adopting the position you seem to be taking would, if applied consistently, lead to such a position of radical agnosticism about pre-modern texts that it would hard to write anything about them. And I'm not just refering to history here - following your conclusions through, how can we know what anybody said about almost anything in the pre-modern world? E.g. How could I teach my students about Plato's Analogy of the Cave if we can't be completely sure that every word is original? How could we debate a particular metaphor in Ovid or a piece of alliteration in Chaucer if the counter-argument is always a shrug and a declaration that "we can't be sure what they really wrote"?

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  4. Hi Vinny,

    Interesting to read your thoughts about my comments on Exploring our Matrix. My own position is that the positions on interpolations you outine are not equivalent.

    Myself, I would say that a statement like "Paul thought that Jesus had a brother called James" is building a position based upon the best available evidence. I would, of course, acknowledge that we might find early or reliable copies of Pauls' letters that lack this passage and that this could well lead me to think that my position is wrong. And of course, in any decent Bible you will find references to passages that mark them out of interpolations or corruptions - the ending of Mark being the most obvious example.

    It seemed that over on Exploring our Matrix you were arguing that the reference to "James the brother of Jesus" might be an interpolation into the original text of Galatians. Now why it's true that it might be an interpolation, I am not aware of any evidence that it is. Moreover, I don't see how such a position could ever be falsified (how could anyone ever prove that you are wrong?)

    Personally, given a choice between a falsiable position based on the best available evidence and a non-falsiable position based on no evidence, I would always, always, go for the first option.

    You're right of course, that we can't be 100% about what was written in pre-modern times, but I think that adopting the position you seem to be taking would, if applied consistently, lead to such a position of radical agnosticism about pre-modern texts that it would hard to write anything about them. And I'm not just refering to history here - following your conclusions through, how can we know what anybody said about almost anything in the pre-modern world? E.g. How could I teach my students about Plato's Analogy of the Cave if we can't be completely sure that every word is original? How could we debate a particular metaphor in Ovid or a piece of alliteration in Chaucer if the counter-argument is always a shrug and a declaration that "we can't be sure what they really wrote"?

    PS: Apologies if this post ends up duplicated. I posted it once and it seems to have vanished!

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  5. Paul,

    For some reason unknown to me, your first attempt went into the spam folder. BTW, I didn't specifically attribute that comment to you by name because I knew that we hadn't explored the issue in sufficient depth for me to be certain that the position I was describing is in fact the one you held.

    Regarding Plato, would it in any way effect the way you teach the Analogy of the Cave if in fact it was written by one of his students ten years after his death and attributed to Plato? Would it matter whether some unknown philosopher writing twenty-five years after Plato's death used Plato's name to get his own work read? I would guess not. I would venture to say that you draw no conclusions that are insufficiently robust to withstand a great deal of interpolation. What matters for almost all arguments one would make based on an ancient work of literature or philosophy is what has come down to us as Chaucer or Ovid or Plato rather than what actually came from the authors pen.

    However, if you were going to infer some historical fact about Plato's time based on something being written originally by Plato himself, I think you would have to take into account the degree of uncertainty that is created by the gap between the earliest extant manuscripts and the autograph. I think you would have to take into account possible reasons that someone might have altered the text. I think that what I'm suggesting is rational agnosticism rather than radical agnosticism.

    I agree that we have to go with the best available evidence, but sometimes the best available evidence isn't all that good and we have to qualify our conclusions accordingly. I think we have to take into account that the earliest manuscripts of Galatians are the product of 150 years of copying by scribes of indeterminate skill during a period in which doctrine was fluid and disputed. This was also a period in which a fair number of people who wanted to invoke Paul's authority on a particular theological point forged letters in his name. Isn't it likely that there would also have been copyists who were willing to make Paul say what they needed him to say? Isn't it likely that some of the forgers were also copyists?

    I think that my position requires positive reasons to think that a particular passage goes back to Paul's own hand, which in most cases would be corroboration or consistency within Paul's writings. If that corroboration is lacking, theories based on a passage being original must be viewed as less certain.

    BTW, I would argue that the hypothesis that any specific words of Paul words were transmitted accurately for those first 150 years is no more falsifiable than the hypothesis that any specific words were altered.

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  6. Vinny,

    Your summary of my position is fair. I recognise that the results of textual criticism are provisional and critics may disagree about a particular passage. Even so, as a non-expert, I'm broadly content to go with the consensus position among textual critics on the likely original wording of a particular text.

    I can't agree that the view that Paul's words have been accurately transmitted in a particular passage is no more falsifiable than the position that they have been corrupted.

    Do you remember a couple of months back it was mentioned, during a debate that Ehrman was involved in, that a new portion of Mark, plus two portions of Paul's letters had been discovered? And that in each case these might be our earliest copies of these texts? Well, assuming these are shown to be authentic and ancient, these documents could provide strong evidence that the corresponding passages we find modern editions of the Bible are interpolations or corruptions if there are substantial differences between them. In this way, it is easy to see how the view that passage x in Paul is genuine could be falsified.

    But I don't see that the process works in reverse. If these texts differed in no way from the current best reconstruction of Paul's original texts, would this falsify the view that these passages are interpolations? I don't see how it would. In fact, since the original autographs are lost, how could any number of newly discovered texts falsify the assertion that a given passage is an interpolation?

    If you were to allow me an equivalently non-falsifiable position, I think that would have to be one that allows me to ignore the scholarly consensus that a given passage is an interpolation and assert that it is authentic. Again, in the absence of the autographs, can you really prove to me that Josephus didn't refer to Jesus as the Christ or state that he appeared alive after three days as the prophets foretold?

    As for Plato, yes I think it would affect the way we understand Plato and the way that we study him. It wouldn't affect some basic questions we might ask - summarising the contents of this or that passage etc. But if we're going to ask some more advanced questions, then I think it starts to matter a whole lot. If we wish to put forward an argument about the development of Plato's thought, say, or how Plato might have been influenced by other philosophers, or discuss inconsistencies or contradictions in his philosphy, how could we discuss our views with anybody else if any given passage that we would drawn upon as evidence could always be gainsaid by the possibilty of an interpolation?

    And if we're going to move on to try to critically assess Plato's thought, then I would say that the problems become worse. Let's say you and I are debating Plato and I want to argue that he's an elitist snob with a low opinion of us plebs and an overinflated opinion of do-nothing aristocrat philosophers. If instead of challenging my arguments you state that Plato might not be an elitist because any elitist passages in Plato could just be an interpolation... well in theory you might be right, but I don't see how the discussion could progress much further.

    And it's the same for other authors - if I want to argue that a given passage in Ovid shows his technical skill or indicates his philosophical beliefs, it seems that anything I say could be nixed by the claim that this passage might be an interpolation.

    I love Pliny's letters but I've always been troubled by the passage where he casually mentions torturing two Christian slave girls : it jars with the humane persona he presents in his letters. Now I could resolve the contradiction with a bit of post hoc justification that the reference to torture is perhaps a Christian interpolation to smear Pliny and that the original passage might have contained no reference to torture (perhaps he actually gave the girls tea and cakes), but it's just not an approach I would be happy with.

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  7. Paul,

    I guess my question is this: If you make an argument about the development of Plato's thought and someone counters it by positing an interpolation, why should I think that your explanation for why the passage reads the way it does is more likely to be true than his? I understand that using the presumption that the earliest known text is in fact what Plato wrote allows you to make an argument about how his thought developed. However, I don't see that the fact that you would like to make such an argument really justifies the presumption. In other words, if you cannot defend the presumption on the grounds that it is most likely to be the case, why should we think that any conclusions which use the presumption are likely to be the case?

    On the other hand, if you could support your argument about the development of Plato's thought using several examples from different writings, I would think that the argument could be persuasive because we could reasonably assign a low probability to the likelihood that all of them are interpolations.

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